Sociolinguistic variationism has contributed much to our understanding of identity and identity construction, including with respect to gender, showing that identity is not simply one’s self-identification but constructed through sociolinguistic elements including indexicality and style. However, much research on sociolinguistic style and indexicality within variationism has studied fairly homogenous populations of language users, and even variationist language and gender research has focused primarily on speakers with only one degree of separation from the unmarked white, straight, middle class, cisgender norm (i.e., gay, cisgender white men), leaving open questions about the application of the social meaning of variables to those whose identities place them more than one degree outside of this norm. Though it is known that social meaning is shaped in the interface between production and perception within variationist sociolinguistics, little work has integrated the two, especially for marginalized speakers. Since racialized and gender non-conforming speakers must rely in large part on normative social meanings of sociolinguistic variables in order to construct their non-normative identities, ideology, power, and identity at the production-perception interface impact how these individuals navigate the sociolinguistic landscape. This dissertation thus explores how ideology and power manifest in the sociolinguistic identity construction of Black and white nonbinary speakers through both qualitative and quantitative analyses of both sociolinguistic production and perception, questioning the semiotic tools that these individuals use for resistance to hegemonic gender norms, with a focus on fronted /s/, a variable robustly tied to gender in previous work.
The first study uses qualitative, grounded theory analyses of interviews with twenty Black and white nonbinary speakers to develop a picture of the styles that these individuals orient to, situating them within greater nonbinary ideologies about gender and the body. Two styles emerge: the chill style, characterized by muted colors, hoodies, and comfortable clothing, and the loud style, characterized by bright colors, makeup, and tight-fitting or “feminine” clothing items. I discuss how these styles are differentiated primarily by notions of visibility and safety, which are mediated by race. The second study, a production study, shows that nonbinary speakers infuse their nonbinary ideologies into their sociolinguistic production of /s/ by using fronted /s/ not simply for more femininity, nor simply to construct their nonbinary styles as chill or loud, but for more gender overall, as both the chill and loud styles employ fronted articulations of /s/. But in the third study, a matched guise perceptual study manipulating /s/ and presenting it to listeners of various identities, Black cisgender, non-Black nonbinary, and Black nonbinary listeners perceive fronted /s/ as feminine regardless of speaker race. Additionally, listeners of all races and genders also perceive Black speakers as less feminine and more angry than white speakers, while nonbinary listeners of all races rated speakers as less masculine and strong than did Black cisgender listeners. These perceptual findings suggest that the relationship between identity, ideology, and sociolinguistic variation is not as simple as expecting that listeners will impart the same ideologies into the act of listening as they do in speaking; rather, listening may at times serve as a normalizing act in itself, while at other times serve as a locus for shifting gender ideologies.
While Black and white nonbinary speakers indeed use language to deconstruct binary gender and to construct their own nonbinary gender identities and styles in response, this dissertation shows that, though nonbinary approaches to sociolinguistic variation are not one-to-one between production and perception, anti-hegemonic nonbinary resistance to binary gender ideologies tends to permeate, even amongst the presence of hegemonic anti-Black ideologies. Racialized and gender non-conforming speakers contend with normative social meanings by at once resisting them and reproducing them, calling into question the limits of power, authorization, and social meaning for indexical resistance.